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Recently I had a discussion with someone who creates vinyl graphics for all kinds of vehicles. He told me about a trick he used that made his vinyl much easier to work with than those of others. I'm going to share this trick with you and even show you a way to do it very quickly.
The key to the whole trick is to round off any square corners. I can already see a couple of you running to CorelDRAW to find the feature you've been looking for. Hold on, it isn't there. First, let me know you how to do this manually and then I'll see what we can do to make it go faster.
Figure 1 (at right) shows a capital A in Arial Black. I've put arrows next to each of the corners so you can easily see they are all squared off. Our goal is to round them just enough to make the vinyl easier to handle without having the roundness visible to the naked eye.
To learn the technique, we'll round off one of the corners. After you see how it is done, you can do the rest of the corners.
Figure 2 (at right) shows the results of these steps. Note that there are two nodes surrounding the rounded corner. We've zoomed in to 30,000% so that you can see things better.
So that you can see how subtle the change is to the corner, look at Figure 3. I've highlighted the rounded corner with the Red arrow. Can you see a difference? Probably only after you've looked a second time.
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You've now seen that it isn't terribly difficult to round the corners, but it can be very time consuming if you have a large number of objects in your drawing. Sure it can take time to work with vinyl if you don't use this trick, but I seriously doubt many people would take the time to round all corners. To find a better answer I went searching on the Internet and found a script that can do it for you automatically. To get your copy, go to http://www.oberonplace.com/vba/drawmacros/roundcornerssh.htm. Unfortunately this script will only work in CorelDRAW 10/11 and only on systems where VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is installed properly. Corel doesn't include VBA with the Academic version of CorelDRAW 10/11 and it doesn't seem to install properly for many other people. It does work fine for me and I've only heard of the problems from others.
Once you've installed the script as described on the Web site, it is time to run it. Make sure any objects are converted to curves and selected. Then select Tools | Visual Basic | Play. Figure 4 (below) shows the dialog box that will appear. I've already selected Corners (RoundCorners.gms) in the Macros in box and then RoundCorners.RoundCorners as the Macro name.
Clicking the Run button will bring up the dialog box in Figure 5 (at right) that allows us to choose the settings we want. I've chosen to have a corner radius of 1/100 of an inch or .01 inches.
After you click OK, it will take a few seconds to process all the new nodes and then you'll have round corners. Obviously, the more corners, the longer it will take to process. The end result is shown in Figure 6 (at right). Again, you'll have to look very carefully to see that the corners are no longer square.
This exercise is pretty typical of many tasks in CorelDRAW. It wasn't difficult to round the corners, just a bit time consuming. And thanks to the wonderful scripting options, a script had already been developed to solve the problem. This script was certainly was too complex for the average user to create, but other tasks aren't nearly so difficult to automate. It all depends on what you are trying to do. For those of you who cut vinyl, you can make life much easier by rounding your corners. This trick may also be helpful to engravers as a rounded corner may be easier to navigate than one that is squared off.
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CorelDRAW X6 Font List · CorelDRAW X5 Font List · CorelDRAW X4 Font List · The Terms of Adobe Photoshop and Corel PHOTO-PAINT · CorelDRAW X3 Font List · Cropping and Rotating Files in Corel PHOTO-PAINT · The Magic of Color Styles · CorelDRAW's Find and Replace Wizard · Shorten Your Design Time with Templates · CorelDRAW's Multi-Faceted Eyedropper Tool · CorelDRAW and Special Characters · The Easy Way to Create Calendars in CorelDRAW · The Wide World of Labels in CorelDRAW · Including Variable Data with Print Merge · Resaving, Resizing & Resampling Files in Corel PHOTO-PAINT · Creating Your Own Fonts in CorelDRAW · The Evils of Using JPEG Files · Speeding Up CorelDRAW 11 and Windows XP · Symbols and Imposition · The Easiest Way to Recreate Logos · A Few Guidelines to Follow · Square Corners Can Be Sticky -- Rounding Corners in CorelDRAW · Creating Complex Shapes Easily with CorelDRAW · Identifying the Mystery Font · Two Ways to Create a Split Front Design · Last Word in Font Management · Calibrating Your Printed Colors with a Color Chart · Graphics Computing in 2001 · Hottest R.A.V.E. In Town · Get the Red Out of Eyes · Secrets of Color Management · Dressing Up Your PDF Files · How Adobe Acrobat Can Make Life Simpler · Why You Want PDF in Your Workflow · Converting a Scanned Logo to Vector in CorelDRAW · Designing 360 Degrees · Customizing Your Interface in CorelDRAW 8.0 · Fitting Text to a Path · Creating Cool Graphs Without a Spreadsheet · From CorelDRAW to Macromedia Flash, A Simple Example · Getting Rid of That Darned White Box · Converting a Bitmap Logo to Vector in CorelDRAW · Finding Clipart with ROMCAT
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Serif WebPlus X2
Xara Web Designer 5.0
Xara Xtreme Pro 4.1
Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Professional
Fuji FinePix 2800 Zoom Digital Camera
Procreate KnockOut 2
Hemera Photo Objects Volume I and II
Wildform SWfx
Macromedia Fontographer 4.1 and FontLab 4
Caligari iSpace v1.5
Xara X
Macromedia Fireworks 4
Web Site Design Made Easy
Alien Skin Eye Candy 4000
Swish 1.51
Macromedia Flash 5
Corel KPT 6
Dreamweaver Ultradev
1st Page 2000
Adobe Illustrator 9
Corel KnockOut v1.5
Xara 3D 4
Cool 3D 3
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